Unsinkable

Why we can’t let go of the Titanic.

One historian has claimed, “The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.”Credit Photograph from National Museums Northern Ireland Collection / Ulster Folk & Transport Museum

In the early nineteen-seventies, my Uncle Walter, who wasn’t a “real” uncle but had a better intuition about my hobbies and interests than some of my blood relatives did, gave me a thrilling gift: membership in the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. I was only twelve, but already hooked. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “like a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s: for me, there was no better story. I had read whatever books the local public library offered, and had spent some of my allowance on a copy of Walter Lord’s indispensable “A Night to Remember.” To this incipient collection Uncle Walter added the precious gift of a biography of the man who designed the ship. It has always been among the first books I pack when I move. A little later, when I was in my midteens, I toiled for a while on a novel about two fourteen-year-old boys, one a Long Islander like myself, the other a British aristocrat, who meet during the doomed maiden voyage. Needless to say, their budding friendship was sundered by the disaster.

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jewelled copy of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION,” the New York Evening Sun crowed less than twenty-four hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE.” Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan. There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut that the Times was moved to print a warning: “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics by enthusiasts, and novels, numbering in the hundreds. There’s even a “Titanic for Dummies.” This centennial month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles.

The books are, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1912 and 1913 more than a hundred songs about the Titanic were published. A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie called “Saved from the Titanic” was released, featuring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who had been a passenger in first class. It established a formula—a love story wrapped around the real-life catastrophe—that has resurfaced again and again, notably in a 1953 tearjerker starring Barbara Stanwyck and in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which, when it was released, was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing film of all time. (The film was rereleased last week, after an eighteen-million-dollar conversion to 3-D.) There have been a host of television treatments. The most recent is a four-part miniseries, to première this weekend, by Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.” And that’s just the English-language output: German dramatizations include a Nazi propaganda film set aboard the ship. A French entry, “The Chambermaid on the Titanic” (1997), based on a novel, fleshes out the story with erotic reveries.

The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. The aura of significance that surrounds the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper the Onion, in 1999, stomping across the page in dire block letters:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

The “news” was accompanied by an archival image of the ship’s famous four-funnelled profile. The subhead pressed the joke: “TITANIC, REPRESENTATION OF MAN’S HUBRIS, SINKS IN NORTH ATLANTIC. 1,500 DEAD IN SYMBOLIC TRAGEDY.”

The Onion’s spoof gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the Titanic seems to be about something. But what? For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that “in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.” For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia; for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.

All these interpretations are legitimate, even provocative; and yet none, somehow, seems wholly satisfying. If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the Titanic and its story properly belong: myth.

If the facts are so well known by now that they seem more like memory than history, it’s thanks to Walter Lord. More than fifty years after its publication, “A Night to Remember” (1955) remains the definitive account; it has never gone out of print. In just under a hundred and fifty pages, the author crisply lays out a story that, he rightly intuited, needs no added drama. He begins virtually at the moment of impact. “High in the crow’s nest” of the sumptuous new ship—the largest ever built, widely admired for its triple-propeller design, and declared by the press to be “unsinkable”—two lookouts peering out at the unusually calm North Atlantic suddenly sight an iceberg “right ahead.” Within a couple of pages, the ship’s fate is sealed: Lord gives us the agonizing thirty-seven seconds that elapsed between the sighting and the collision, and then the eerily understated moment of impact, the “faint grinding jar” felt by so many passengers and crew. (“If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled,” one survivor recalled.) Only then does he fill in what led up to that moment—not least the decision to speed through waters known to be strewn with icebergs—and what followed.

Until Lord’s book, what most people had read about the Titanic came from the initial news stories, and then, as the years passed, from articles and interviews published on anniversaries of the sinking. Lord was the first writer to put it all together from a more distanced perspective. The unhurried detachment of his account nicely mirrors the odd calm that, according to so many survivors’ accounts, long prevailed aboard the stricken liner. “And so it went,” Lord wrote. “No bells or sirens, no general alarm.” His account has no bells or sirens, either; the catastrophe unfolds almost dreamily. There are the nonchalant reactions of passengers and crew, many of whom felt the sinking ship was a better bet than the tiny lifeboats. (“We are safer here than in that little boat,” J. J. Astor declared; he drowned.) There are the oddly revealing decisions: one socialite left his cabin, then went back and, ignoring the three hundred thousand dollars in stocks and bonds that he had stashed in a tin box, grabbed a good-luck charm and three oranges. There is the growing realization that there weren’t enough lifeboats; of those, many were lowered half full. There are the rockets fired off in distress, which one passenger recalled as paling against the dazzling starlight. And then the shattering end, marked by the din of the ship’s giant boilers, torn loose from their housings, hurtling downward toward the submerged bows.

There are iconic moments of panache and devotion, and of cowardice. Benjamin Guggenheim really did trade in his life jacket for white tie and tails. Mrs. Isidor Straus really did refuse to leave her husband, a co-owner of Macy’s: “Where you go, I go,” she was heard to say. Among the songs written after the sinking was one in Yiddish, celebrating the couple’s devotion. And—an anecdote that has been repeated in everything from a poison-pen letter sent soon after the sinking to an episode of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”—a woman in a lifeboat turned out not to be a woman at all. It was just a terrified Irish youth wrapped in a shawl.

Lord had access to many survivors, and the details that had lodged in their memories have the persuasive oddness of truth. One provides an unsettling soundtrack to the dreadful hour and a half between the sinking, at two-twenty in the morning, and the appearance of a rescue ship. Jack Thayer, a teen-age passenger from Philadelphia’s Main Line, who was one of only a handful of people picked out of the water by lifeboats, later recalled that the sound made by the many hundreds of people flailing in the twenty-eight-degree water, drowning or freezing to death, was like the noise of locusts buzzing in the Pennsylvania countryside on a summer night.

The closest that “A Night to Remember” comes to engineering drama is an account, shrewdly spliced into the larger narrative, of the doings of two ships that would become intimately associated with the disaster. One was the little Cunard liner Carpathia, eastbound that night en route from New York to the Mediterranean. Fifty-eight miles away from the Titanic when it picked up her first distress calls, it was the only ship to hasten to the big liner’s rescue, reversing its course and shutting off heat and hot water in an attempt to maximize fuel efficiency.

The other was the Californian, a small steamer that had stopped about ten miles from the Titanic—unlike the doomed ship, it had heeded the ice warnings—and sat there all through that terrible night, disregarding the Titanic’s frantic signalling, by wireless, Morse lamp, and, finally, rockets. Not all of this was as inexplicable as it seems: the Californian didn’t have a nighttime wireless operator. (All passenger ships were subsequently required by law to have round-the-clock wireless.) But no one has ever sufficiently explained why the Californian’s captain, officers, and crew failed to respond to what seemed like obvious signs of distress. The second officer merely thought it strange that a ship would be firing rockets at night. If Lord had been given to large interpretations, he might have seen in the one ship a symbol of the urgent force of human striving and, in the other, the immovable resistance of sheer stupidity.

About halfway through “A Night to Remember”—this is just after the ship has gone under, and an English socialite in a lifeboat turns to her secretary and sighs, “There is your beautiful nightdress gone”—Lord interrupts his narrative for a few pages of musings about what it all means. The themes he finds are characterized by an appealing combination of nostalgia and skepticism. One notion is that the sinking marked “the end of the old days” of nineteenth-century technological confidence, as well as of “noblesse oblige”; another is a sense that people behaved better back then, whether noblesse, steerage, or crew. When one officer was finally picked up from his lifeboat, he carefully stowed the sails and the mast before climbing aboard the rescue ship.

But overshadowing everything is the problem of money and class. The Titanic’s story irresistibly reads as a parable about a gilded age in which death was anything but democratic, as was made clear by a notorious statistic: of the men in first class—who paid as much as four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars for a one-way fare at a time when the average annual household income in the U.S. was eight hundred dollars—the percentage of survivors was roughly the same as that of children in third class. For all his sentimentality about gentlemanly chivalry, Lord doesn’t shy away from what the sinking and its aftermath revealed about the era’s privileges and prejudices. “Even the passengers’ dogs were glamorous,” begins a tongue-in-cheek catalogue in “A Night to Remember” that includes a Pekingese called Sun Yatsen—part of the entourage of Henry Harper, of the publishing family, who, Lord laconically reports, had also picked up an Egyptian dragoman during his preëmbarkation travels, “as a sort of joke.” The book traces a damning arc from the special treatment enjoyed by the pets to the way in which third-class passengers were, at the end, “ignored, neglected, forgotten.”

Even so, Lord kept his sermonizing to a minimum. His book ends on a grace note: the seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer climbing into a bunk on the Carpathia, which saved seven hundred and six of the Titanic’s twenty-two hundred and twenty-three souls, and falling asleep after swallowing his first ever glass of brandy. “A Night to Remember” left the love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.

One sign of how efficiently Lord did his job is the air of embarrassment that hangs over the latest studies. John Maxtone-Graham, whose fond and thoroughgoing “The Only Way to Cross,” published in 1972, is considered a classic history of the ocean-liner era, interrupts his “Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner” (Norton) halfway through in order to admit that he’d spent a long time trying to avoid the subject altogether. John Welshman’s “Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town” (Oxford) aims to “both build upon and challenge ‘A Night to Remember.’ ” His subtitle is a phrase borrowed from Lord’s book.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there seems to be no shortage of new angles. Because the allegedly unsinkable ship sank, its design and construction, as well as the number and disposition of the lifeboats, have often been the subject of debate. But Maxtone-Graham shifts the technological focus, by pointing up the crucial role of wireless communication. The Titanic was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send S.O.S.,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?,” came one response to the Titanic’s distress call.

In “Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town,” Welshman works hard to “re-balance the narrative” about privilege, looking past the glamour of first class and the pathos of steerage to the stories of second-class passengers. His technique of providing little biographies of all his characters probably tests the limits of the human-interest approach (“the export of butter from Finland was growing rapidly”), but he offers wonderfully idiosyncratic details. A British science teacher felt an odd “sense of security” once the ship came to a stop, “like standing on a large rock in the middle of the ocean”; another survivor, a boy of nine at the time, realized long after settling with his family in the Midwest that he couldn’t bring himself to go to Detroit Tigers games because the noise that greeted home runs reminded him of the cries of the dying.

The impulse to reappraise is not new. The best dissection of Titanic mythmaking is Steven Biel’s “Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster,” first published in 1996 and now updated for the centenary. Biel, a Harvard historian, showed how the Titanic’s story has been made to serve the purposes of everyone from anti-suffragettes to the labor movement to Republicans. He argues that, while the sinking was “neither catalyst nor cause,” it “did expose and come to represent anxieties about modernity.” One of these was race: an assault on one of the wireless operators during the ship’s final minutes was blamed on a nonexistent “Negro” crew member. The influx of “new,” non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants was another. Reports by crew members and coverage in the press revealed a prejudice against southern Europeans so pervasive that the Italian Ambassador to the United States was moved to make a formal complaint.

Sometimes, the fancy critical frameworks get out of hand: Welshman’s eagerness to talk about “the lifeboat as metaphor” seems a bit grotesque, in this case. One reason that the Titanic grips the imagination even today is that it poses the big questions: as Nathaniel Philbrick writes in the introduction to a new edition of Lord’s book, “Who will survive?” and “What would I have done?” These hover over Frances Wilson’s “How to Survive the Titanic; or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay” (Harper Perennial), a biography of one of the most controversial figures in this story: the man who was the managing director of the company that owned the ship. Ismay was widely reviled for having entered a lifeboat rather than going down with his ship; worse, perhaps, it seems to have been he who pressed the Titanic’s experienced captain, E. J. Smith, to maintain a relatively high speed even though the ship had been receiving ice warnings.

Twining Ismay’s story around a series of reflections on Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” a novel about a ship’s mate who abandons his vessel, Wilson at once confirms and undercuts the familiar cartoon of Ismay. To be sure, there are the sense of entitlement and the convenient ethics. “I cannot feel I have done anything wrong and cannot blame myself for the disaster,” he wrote to the widow of one drowned passenger. And yet Wilson deftly evokes the emotional complexities beneath. Drawing on an unpublished correspondence, she reveals that, during the voyage, Ismay fell in love with young Jack Thayer’s mother, Marian, and paid her epistolary court after the sinking left her a widow. Even here, though, a self-serving coldness prevailed. When Marian asked for help with her insurance claim, Ismay replied, “I am deeply sorry for the loss you have sustained and of course I know any claim you put in would be absolutely right, but you must agree with me that all claims must be dealt with on the same basis now don’t you?”

If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is one major reason the Titanic disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell the story reveals more about us than it does about what happened. If the indignant depictions of the class system in so many Titanic dramas coexist uneasily with their adoring depictions of upper-crust privilege, that, too, is part of the appeal: it allows us to demonstrate our liberalism even as we indulge our consumerism. In Cameron’s movie, you root for the steerage passenger who improbably pauses, during a last dash for a boat, to make a sardonic comment about the band as it famously played on (“Music to drown by—now I know I’m in first class”), but you’re also happy to lounge with Kate Winslet on a sunbathed private promenade deck while a uniformed maid cleans up on her hands and knees after breakfast.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the strongest treatment of this issue was the 1958 film of Lord’s book, made in Britain—which is to say, by people who had a better feel for class distinctions than Lord (an American) did, and who were working at a time when the class system was under tremendous strain, and was the object of relentless examination in literature and theatre. It says something that the only star in the film (the popular actor Kenneth More) played a comparatively lowly, though heroic, character—Second Officer Herbert Lightoller, who managed to keep thirty men alive while they all stood on an overturned lifeboat. The film, like the book, depends for its effectiveness on a straightforward presentation of information and an accumulation of damning detail. A short scene in which a group of Irish steerage passengers breaks through a metal gate as they make their way to the lifeboats—they suddenly find themselves in the first-class dining room, set for the next morning’s breakfast, and at first can barely bring themselves to penetrate this sacred space—tells you more about the class system than Cameron’s cruder populism does.

It certainly tells you more than the ham-handed treatment of the subject in the new Julian Fellowes miniseries. In his hugely popular “Downton Abbey,” and in the script for “Gosford Park,” Fellowes showed a subtle feel for the ironies of class, but his Titanic sinks under the weight of its ideological baggage: the sneering condescension of the first-class passengers is so caricatured that it ends up having no traction. (“We are a political family,” a snooty countess observes. “You, I think, have always been in trade.”) There’s even a fugitive Russian anarchist aboard to give free lessons in politics: “Europe was wrong for me.” Worse, the production looks cheap: the first-class dining room has the ad-hoc fanciness of a high-school cafeteria on prom night. This is a Titanic drama in which the class outrage feels synthetic and there’s no compensatory luxe.

If the underlying theme of all Titanic dramatizations has been class, the engine driving the plot has nearly always been romance. Apart from “A Night to Remember,” movies and television have tended to ignore the Carpathia-Californian drama, preferring to use the Titanic as a lavish backdrop for tragic passions and eleventh-hour lessons about the redemptive value of love. Fellowes takes this to new heights, or perhaps depths: whereas previous adapters of the story have made their star-crossed lovers fictional, he foists an invented upper-class suffragette on an actual first-class passenger, Harry Widener, to whose death Harvard students owe their university library, built as a memorial by Harry’s mother. If I were a Widener, I’d sue.

The yoking of romance to the disaster narrative began with “Saved from the Titanic,” the 1912 movie with the weirdly prescient “reality” angle—it’s the one that starred an actual survivor. In it, the heroine must overcome her fear of the sea so that her naval-officer fiancé can fulfill his duty. The sinking haunts a 1929 British talkie, “Atlantic,” which sets an adulterous affair on a Titanic-like liner, and a bizarre 1937 tragicomedy called “History Is Made at Night,” in which Jean Arthur plays a wealthy American who falls for a famous headwaiter, played by Charles Boyer, and travels to Europe with him on a liner that hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage.

The actual Titanic makes an important appearance in Noël Coward’s “Cavalcade,” a hit on both stage and screen in the early nineteen-thirties. But it took another twenty years for Hollywood to inject romantic melodrama into the story. In Jean Negulesco’s “Titanic” (1953), Barbara Stanwyck plays Julia Sturges, a Midwestern woman unhappily married to a wealthy man (played by Clifton Webb) from whom she’s become estranged while living an empty life of the beau monde—“the same silly calendar year after year . . . jumping from party to party, from title to title, all the rest of your life,” as she says, when explaining why she has absconded with their two children, a marriageable girl and a boy on the verge of adolescence. The arc of the drama traces the husband’s evolution from a superficial cad to a self-sacrificing hero; more important, it outlines the couple’s trajectory from estrangement to an inevitable last-minute reconciliation that makes them both realize what’s really valuable—not money but love.

If the Titanic is a vehicle for working out our cultural anxieties, the 1953 film makes it clear that one of those, during the first years of the Cold War, was the question of who the good guys were. “We’re Americans and we belong in America,” Julia declares. Middle-class Americans, too: you learn that Julia had started out as a “girl who bought her hats out of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue.” On board the Titanic, her prissy, Europeanized daughter is being wooed by a handsome American undergraduate who pointedly remarks that the “P” on his letter shirt stands for Purdue, not Princeton. Steven Biel’s “Down with the Old Canoe” makes a further argument: that the film represents Cold War-era nostalgia for a more manageable kind of apocalypse—not the blinding thermonuclear flash but the slow freeze that left you time to write your own ending.

With its focus on feminine suffering and self-sacrifice, and, especially, in its presentation of an ill-fated romance between the unpretentious young man and the class-bound society girl, the 1953 “Titanic,” which won an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay, anticipated Cameron’s 1997 movie, which won Oscars for just about everything. A lot of the dialogue that Cameron put in the mouth of his frustrated débutante, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), reminds you of Barbara Stanwyck’s lines: “I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it,” Rose recalls, explaining her attraction to a carefree young artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). “An endless parade of parties, cotillions . . . the same mindless chatter.” But Cameron gave his film a feminist rather than a patriotic spin. Rose, of a “good” but impoverished Main Line family, is being married off to the loathsome Cal Hockley, who seals their engagement with the gift of a blue diamond that had belonged to Louis XVI. (“We are royalty,” he smugly tells her as he drapes the giant rock around her neck.) “It’s so unfair,” she sighs during a conversation with her odiously snobbish mother, who, in the same scene, is lacing Rose tightly into a corset. “Of course it’s unfair,” the mother retorts. “We’re women.” Small wonder that nearly half the female viewers under twenty-five who saw the movie went to see it a second time within two months of its release, and that three-quarters of those said that they’d see it again.

Rose isn’t the only troubled girl who’s being manhandled. Like all ships, the Titanic was a “she,” and Cameron went to some lengths to push the identification between the ship and the young woman. Both are, to all appearances, “maidens” who are en route to losing their virginity; both are presented as the beautiful objects of men’s possessive adoration, intended for the gratification of male egos. “She’s the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all of history,” a smug Ismay boasts to some appreciative tablemates at lunch. Later, as Rose goes in to dinner, one of Cal’s fat-cat friends commends him on his fiancée as if she, too, were a prized object: “Congratulations, Hockley—she’s splendid!”

Cameron underscored the parallels between the young woman and the liner in other ways. The scene in which Jack holds Rose by the waist as she stands at the prow, arms outstretched, heading into what will be the Titanic’s last sunset, has become an iconic moment in American cinema. (And indeed in life: a couple was married in a submersible parked near that very spot.) But far more haunting is the way the image of the speeding prow in this scene morphs, seconds afterward, into a by now equally famous image from real life—the same prow as it looks today, half buried in Atlantic mud under two and a half miles of seawater, drained of color, purpose, and life. In this movie, there’s only one other beautiful “she” that is transformed in this way: we see the flushed face of Kate Winslet, as the young Rose on the night she poses nude for Jack, suddenly wither into the wrinkled visage of Gloria Stuart, the actress whom Cameron cannily chose to play Rose in the modern-day sequences of the narrative. Stuart, a star of the nineteen-thirties, was less than a generation younger than Dorothy Gibson, the lead in the 1912 film.

When you compare Cameron’s movie to its 1953 predecessor, the evolution in attitudes is striking. The emotional climax of the earlier film is marked by Julia Sturges’s agonized realization that she belongs with her husband after all; the disaster brings this shattered family back together again. Cameron’s picture is about breaking the bonds of family, a point made by means of a clever contrast between its two leading ladies—Rose and the Titanic. At the start of the movie, the ship speeds confidently forward while Rose is described as being “trapped” and unable to “break free” (that corset, that mother); by the end, the ship is immobilized, while the girl strikes off on her own, literally and figuratively. She has to abandon the piece of panelling she’s climbed onto—and tearfully let go of Jack (now a frozen corpse), which she’d promised never to do—in order to swim for help.

Rose, in other words, saves herself; in the end the Titanic is the sacrifice, the price that must be paid for Rose’s rebirth as a girl who acts by and for herself. Or, rather, a woman: she memorably makes love to Jack during her journey, and gets to New York, while the ship remains a maiden forever. This is another reason we can’t get the story out of our heads. If the Titanic had sunk on her twenty-seventh voyage, it wouldn’t haunt us in the same way. It’s the incompleteness that never stops tantalizing us, tempting us to fill in the blanks with more narrative.

Toward the end of “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord briefly nodded to “the element of fate” in the story, which teases its audience with a sense at once of inevitability and of how easily things might have turned out differently. It is, he says, like “classic Greek tragedy.”

He was right. All the energy spent on the mechanics, the romance, the construction, the passenger list, the endless debates about what the Californian might have done and just how many people perished (still never resolved) has distracted from what may, in the end, be the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful “maiden” sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.

But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption. The ship starts out like Oedipus: admired, idolized, hailed as different, special, exalted. Sophocles’ play derives its horrible excitement from a relentless exposition of its protagonist’s fall from grace—and from the fact that his confidence and his talents are what prevented him from seeing the looming disaster. Cameron understood this. The enormous resources at his disposal enabled him to give us that other hero: the ship itself, re-created in overwhelming detail. The scene in which the liner puts out to sea, the stokers filling the boilers, the steam gauges rising, the chunk-chunk of the turbines gathering speed as the pistons thrust up and down—culminating in an underwater shot of the triple propellers starting to churn the water—sets up what you could call “the mechanical tragedy.” The director knew that there is an ancient theatrical pleasure, not totally free of Schadenfreude, in watching something beautiful fall apart.

All this is why we keep watching Cameron’s movie, and why we can’t stop thinking about the Titanic. The tale irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature.

So much about the story enhances the feeling of an artistic composition. The ship’s mythic name—the Titans were a race of superbeings who fought the gods and lost—points up a classic theme: hubris punished. (“God himself could not sink this ship.”) Steven Biel reproduces the lyrics of a song sung by South Carolina cotton-mill workers: “This great ship was built by man / That is why she could not stand / She could not sink was the cry from one and all / But an iceberg ripped her side / And He cut down all her pride.” A rumor that started circulating at the time of the disaster maintained that her sister ship, the Britannic, was supposed to have been called the Gigantic but was given a less fate-tempting name.

The structure of the Titanic’s story has the elegant symmetry of literature, too: the hero is caught between an energetic savior (the Carpathia) and an obtuse villain (the Californian). And there’s something else that suggests a quality of having been designed as a dramatic spectacle. One big difference between the Titanic and other wrecks—the Lusitania, say—is the way her story unfolded in real time. Torpedoed by a U-boat in May, 1915, the Cunard liner sank in eighteen minutes—too short an interval, in other words, to generate stories. The Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to founder after hitting the berg—which is to say, about the time it takes for a big blockbuster to tell a story.

Tragic déjà vu, classic themes, perfect structure, flawless timing: if you’d made the Titanic up, it couldn’t get any better. But someone did make it up. Perhaps the most unsettling item in the immense inventory of Titanic trivia is a novel called “Futility,” by an American writer named Morgan Robertson. It begins with a great ocean liner of innovative triple-screw design, “the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. . . . Unsinkable—indestructible.” Speeding along in dangerous conditions, the ship first hits something on its starboard side (“A slight jar shook the forward end”); later on, there is a terrifying cry of “Ice ahead,” and the vessel collides with an iceberg and goes down.

As the title suggests, the themes of this work of fiction are the old ones: the vanity of human striving, divine punishment for overweening confidence in our technological achievement, the futility of human effort in a world ruled by indifferent nature. But the writing comes to life only when Robertson focusses on the mechanical details, as in the scene of the aftermath of the collision:

Seventy-five thousand tons—dead-weight—rushing through the fog at the rate of fifty feet per second, had hurled itself at an iceberg. . . . She rose out of the sea, higher and higher—until the propellers in the stern were half exposed. . . . The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring, snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings and fore-and-after bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the sides of the ship . . . the roar of escaping steam, and the bee-like buzzing of nearly three thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings. . . . A solid, pyramid-like hummock of ice, left to starboard.

Down to the most idiosyncratic detail, all this is familiar: the beelike buzzing seems like a nod to Jack Thayer’s comparison of the sounds of the dying to locusts on a summer night. And yet it couldn’t be. Robertson published his book in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sailed. If she continues to haunt our imagination, it’s because we were dreaming her long before the fresh spring afternoon when she turned her bows westward and, for the first time, headed toward the open sea. ♦

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of seven books, including “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture” and “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.” He teaches at Bard College.